New “All Day Hangout” Cafe Coming To Cortelyou Road

We have the latest scoop on the new restaurant and bar opening at 1616 Cortelyou Road. Now called Victorian Flatbush Counter, the “all day hangout” is the latest venture from the owner of Café Madeline Adell, who has made some tweaks to the plan since we last spoke.

The new spot will serve as an extension of Café Madeline, fostering the café’s casual setting with the addition of a full menu and bar. “We welcome people to hang out as long as they want,” Adell said. “Where [other places] discourage laptops, we love it and welcome it. We’re known for this.”

The Counter will be open from 8am until midnight and will feature a full juice bar, 20 craft beers on tap, taps serving wine and Grady’s cold brew, and a curated selection of bottles, cans, and local provisions.

The bar will also serve a unique selection of cocktails, including drinks mixing cold brew and beer. “It’s a new thing a lot of people are not familiar with,” Adell said, “So we’re going to bring that to the neighborhood.”

The diverse menu will be under the guidance of head chef Jimmy Clark, whose impressive resume includes work at Battersby in Boerum Hill and The Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights. “We’ll do grass-fed burgers and steaks,” Adell said, “lots of fish on the menu as well. Fine dining in a casual setting.”

42 COMMENTS

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic but in case you’re sincere, the photo isn’t upside down. For some bewildering reason, the cafe owners decided it made good aesthetic sense to have the venue name printed upside down on the awning. I’m hoping someone goofed and the awning was just screwed up because I’d hate to have this eyesore become a permanent fixture in the neighborhood. If it was deliberate…well, I don’t want to ponder living in a world were people make such stupid choices.

Aaaand I’m officially old because after years of reading this blog, it took the most inconsequential of neighborhood “issues” to get me to post a comment.

The Costello Plan is wine bar with some craft brews and its not quite same as the others, but Manchego is changing that. Sycamore is the MPD bar, which just means it tries to hard to be something for everyone. Propellerhead doesn’t serve alcohol yet and well see what it becomes. Oxcart is restaurant first and bar in distant second. Highbury works for the catch up and Bar Chord can be same if you go out back, also with the only regular live music scene. I haven’t been to 773 since its risen from the ashes and I have no idea if its become anything other than the local dive.

To me, each place has its special little corner. Does it all work? Time shall be teller of tales for fortunes made and lost.

I’m doubtful on it being ‘affordable’ in the terms your thinking. In Spain, these places are the norm and tapas can be anything from chips to something quite a bit more. When transplanted here, it takes on the intention of being something a bit more special, and therefore more expensive than typical.

$9-$20 per glass would be my idea of “affordable”, wine places are generally on the expensive side. Sometimes they go with you need to buy a full bottle or something like that which can then run very high and/or just run the glass prices very high. It’d be nice if they had some flight stuff so you could try a lot of different wines in a smaller portion as well. If you could generally get 2-3 wine glasses for 2 people for somewhere around $100 I’d consider that “affordable” in today’s prices, everything is expensive. I certainly wouldn’t be there everyday but if it was around there I’d pop in every few weeks or so.

At $9 dollars a glass, the typical cost of bottle could be no more than $9 for the bar. Which you can assume will be tough finding a good bottle at that cost. Maybe something quaff-able, but nothing notable. At that point you need to think about how you want to present. Cheap and cheerful or well executed and moderate. Wine bars tend to better with the latter.

Anyway, the range I expect would be $13-$25 by the glass and full bottles will run the gamut. Flights are rarely ever used for wine and for good reasons. I am still curios to see what they make out of the tapas. They could go down the simple and easy route or do some things requiring effort. From the looks of it, it won’t be long before we find out.

Well, my point was it would be a lot easier if half the tables weren’t filled with people sitting by themselves at a whole table nursing a coffee and working in their computers for far longer than it takes to eat and leave. But sure, I recognize it is tough to get a table at prime times. Which is why I think laptop-free weekends are a good idea.

I’ve had plenty of problems getting a table there on weekends because of the laptop coffee nursing folks. Since it’s the farthest from the house, we often don’t make the trip because of the high potential of frustration. Too bad for Madeline, because we’d spend more in 35 minutes then some of these tables do in 4 hours.

As far as the awning goes, ridiculous. Many ways to push design and visual boundaries “to get people talking” but this is just not done well with the horsey, oversized type, besides being inexplicably upside down. It screams “If it’s bigger, it must be better,” and that’s not really the way good design works.